X-Treme(!) Textbooks!

Textbooks are like the ultimate multi-media experience.  More visually stimulating than a Pink Floyd laser-light show, more technologically savvy than most people born prior to 1970, the books today do more than simply convey information in a useful way; they indulge our national attention deficit disorder.

The accounting book that I picked up for this semester is officially the most expensive book I’ve ever purchased, totaling something like $184.00.  This bad-boy is more than just a book, though.  It should really be described as a “Professor in a Box”.  It came with a card (looks just like a credit card) that gives me access to McGraw-Hill’s Homework Manager (Plus) website; the site has everything!  The chapters are already condensed and annotated for my reading convenience, there are slide shows with audio guides, self-test quizzes, digital flash cards, and much, much more!

What the hell?  There’s no way in the world that I could possibly make use of a quarter of the information that McGraw-Hill has put at my disposal and  still hope to keep up with the class work that I need to do.  Besides, what’s left for my professor?  I’m sure that I’m getting something for the tens-of-thousands of dollars that I’m putting out for tuition, so why does the textbook publisher think that they need to take responsibility for both providing documentation on a subject, and teaching it to me?

It’s all of these full color pages of graphs and homework manager plus websites (with free, live, homework help!  Seriously!) that create the requirement for me to pay $500 or more per semester buying books.  That’s terrible, I don’t need all this stuff.  They are going to have to start selling books like car dealers sell their product (since they cost nearly the same amount); we need trim packages for textbooks.  The economy level will get you a black and white textbook with the required information for like $20.00.  You could have a mid-market model with some color photos and maybe some slide shows for $40.00.  Then, perhaps, the Hummer of textbooks with all this crap that I currently have for $180.00.  Just as people buy Hummer H2s even though gas is $3.50 a gallon, some people will also buy the Hummer of textbooks even though they’re under-paid college students; but as we aren’t all forced to buy $40,000 cars if we want a ride, why should be have to buy $200.00 books if we just want to read?

Choosing a School

Different people choose schools for different reasons. If you are living in Central Kansas, then you’re choice may be based on the fact that there are no Universities near you, whereas if you live down the street from Harvard, that may seem like a viable option to you while moving across country doesn’t.

I live in Kansas City, and there are a number of schools in my area that were good options for me. I graduated with my undergraduate from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and they have a well respected business school. There was Rockhurst, the private Jesuit school (the Helzberg School of Management), the University of Kansas is 45 minutes from me, and there are other schools such as the University of Phoenix (online), Keller (DeVry), Ottawa University, and so on.

For me, UMKC wasn’t an option. As an undergraduate I found that University to be academically lax, poorly run, uncaring and over-expensive for a public University. I had no reason to believe that the graduate school would be any better, and never gave any real consideration to staying at that school. KU is a well known and respected University, but I never gave it any real consideration either, mostly due to the issue of out-of-state tuition and the thought of driving to Lawrence all the time wasn’t especially appealing to me. The University of Phoenix and Keller Graduate School both seem like diploma mills to me (I did a semester at DeVry right out of high school and was under whelmed with their academic offerings anyway), and Ottawa University is a fine school (my mom got her undergraduate in Accounting from Ottawa) but it’s a Kansas School, like KU, and so the same issues surrounding travel time and out-of-state tuition applied.

In the end, I decided on Rockhurst University. They are well regarded as the top Business School in the Midwest, and have a great reputation in the area for cranking out top-notch talent. The school claims (and I’ve no reason to doubt) that fully 10% of their MBA graduates are currently acting as CEO or President of a company or organization of some sort. Honestly, I’m not sure how that compares to other Universities, but as others were silent on the issue, I have to assume that they don’t have that same type of success rate. I also have a great deal of respect for the Jesuits, saving as they did the Catholic Church and probably all of Western Civilization from the clutches of religion induced ignorance in the 1600s. I’m not a Catholic, but I still admire the Jesuit order’s history of academic excellence, and also appreciate the company that I’m keeping; other Jesuit institutions, of which there are 28 in the United States, include: Georgetown University, Loyola in MD, Boston College, and Wheeling.

One of my first concerns in choosing a business school was how that choice would affect my future success in business, and my future income. There is lots of disagreement on this point and one can basically be supported in whatever position they wish to take by the literature. Some respected sources more-or-less say that unless you went to a top-tier school, you were really wasting your time with an MBA. Other similarly well respected sources (NPR on or around 7/25/06 for instance) states that information showed an MBA from any school would earn you similar success and money throughout your career. The position that I’ve taken is this: only about 19% of Americans attain a four year degree, and roughly 8.9% attain an advanced degree. As an educated person, and especially a person with an advanced degree, you’re in pretty elite company and business really can’t afford to be (all that) picky about schools if they want educated and qualified people in their ranks. With all that in mind, I picked what I felt was the best school that 1) I could afford and 2) that I didn’t have to move my family and quit my job to attend.

During the search I did not look at any “rankings”, as the general consensus seems to be that these rankings are based on issues other than academic rigor and post-program student performance, the only two issues that really matter at all when it comes to choosing a school.

So, I believe that I chose well for me. I’ll be able to speak more intelligently about my choice after I’ve actually attended a class at Rockhurst, but I feel confident in my decision which is always something that you should look for in everything you do.